by Giovanni Cucci
Going into the content of the Diary of a pain by Clive S. Lewis, the first chapter (the first notebook) begins by giving expression to the prevailing feelings that occupy the writer's soul, pain, fear, anger, sadness. They are the feelings linked to the loss of hope, which death comes to sanction: «No one had ever told me that pain is so similar to fear. Not that I'm afraid: the resemblance is physical. The same stomach flips, the same restlessness, the yawns. I swallow all the time."
Lewis is a believer, but this does not alleviate the pain, in fact it makes it even more heartbreaking: if at the origin of life there is a God who is love and can do everything, why then do we experience pain, illness, death, separation and about detachment? These questions arouse indignation and anger, which the writer gives voice to with honesty and frankness: «And in the meantime, where is God? Of all the symptoms, this is one of the most disturbing. When you are happy, so happy that you don't need Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His requests as an interruption, if you recover and turn to Him to thank and praise Him, you are welcomed (at least this is what you try) with open arms. But you go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and the sound of a double bolt inside. Then, silence. The longer you wait, the more the silence grows. There are no lights in the windows. It could be an empty house. Has it ever been inhabited? Once upon a time, it seemed so. And it was an impression just as strong as the one now. What does it mean? Why is his empire so present in prosperity, and his help so totally absent in tribulation? One answer, all too easy, is that God seems absent in the moment of our greatest need precisely because he is absent, because he does not exist. But then why does he seem so present when we, to put it frankly, are not looking for him?
They are reflections that express a common experience of the believer. They can be compared to the evangelical passage which reports the Canaanite woman's heartbreaking plea to Jesus, a plea that seems to remain completely unheard: "But he did not even say a word to her" (Mt 15,23).
Giving expression to one's anger, without pretense or censorship, even in front of God, is an indispensable aspect of mourning. The Bible does not censure the believer's anger, on the contrary it expressly invites them to give voice to it, as for example in the compositions known as "imprecatory psalms", which however, significantly, have been removed from the liturgy of the hours, or largely cut. It is a sign of our culture's difficulty in uniting anger and prayer, praise and aggression, ending up considering them irreconcilable. And instead they are a high form of prayer capable of transforming anger and making it the object of one's relationship with God: «The imprecatory psalms are extremely demanding because they establish the principle according to which even in the face of injustice and evil suffered one deprives oneself to take justice into our own hands, we do not give in to the temptation to respond to evil with evil, to violence with violence, but we allow God's justice to be done" (E. Bianchi). For this reason, rather than "imprecators", it would be more correct to call them psalms of supplication and asceticism, of purification of one's destructive emotions.
Faced with the anger of others we instinctively retreat in fear, yet this is an indispensable step in returning to life; it is a form of truth with oneself and one's suffering situation, a request for meaning animated by hope and which, if censored, could lead to destructive tendencies, towards oneself or towards others.
By speaking out about his anger, Lewis does not hide the gravity of its implications. It presents him with the possibility of a non-existent God or, worse, a sadistic and malignant one; along with this, other questions still pop up in his mind, and push him to face the challenge of complexity.